Sixteen Weeks, Eight Engineers, Four Contractors
A regulatory reporting system has a 22-week estimate from eight engineers (P50), with a P80 of 26 weeks. The sponsor has committed to a 16-week regulatory deadline and proposes adding four contractors from week 3 plus mandatory overtime at 50 hours per week. Historical data shows 20% of effort goes to rework, contractors need about four weeks to reach 50% productivity and later reach 80%, and that overtime on this team has previously increased defect injection and produced a rework tail after release. The critical path includes a data migration and external regulator review that the team cannot parallelize. The sponsor asks for a plan that hits 16 weeks.
1. Evaluate the proposal quantitatively. What effective capacity does it actually add, and what does the critical path imply?
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The arithmetic does not support 16 weeks, and the plan adds risk faster than capacity.
Capacity check: the 22-week estimate assumes 8 engineers, roughly 176 engineer-weeks. Sixteen weeks at the same output requires about 37% more effective capacity. The proposal supplies:
- Overtime: 50 hours versus 40 is 25% more nominal hours, but sustained overtime historically produces less than proportional output and more defects; assume 10 to 15% effective gain, plus a rework tail after the deadline.
- Contractors: four people, four weeks at 50% productivity then 80% until week 16. Nominal contribution is about 4 x (4 x 0.5 + 10 x 0.8) = 40 engineer-weeks; effective contribution is lower after review, onboarding support, and coordination overhead, perhaps 30.
- Coordination cost: communication paths rise from 28 to 78, and the new people consume the strongest engineers during the critical period.
Critical path: the data migration and regulator review are sequential and cannot be compressed by adding people. Work added to non-critical tasks increases cost without moving the date.
Conclusion: present 16 weeks as unachievable within the current scope at acceptable quality. Give P50 22 and P80 26 weeks, and state what must change: scope, phasing, or the date.
2. What options should the sponsor see, and how should they be compared?
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Present options with dates, cost, and risk; do not present a single refusal.
Options:
- Scope reduction. Cut to regulatory must-haves. If 30% of features are should-have or could-have, a 16-week regulatory release plus a 22-week full release may satisfy the deadline. The sponsor must accept the reduced scope in writing and own the business impact.
- Phased delivery. Ship the compliance-critical slice at week 16 behind flags, with remaining functionality at week 22. Costs include extra release engineering and temporary operational complexity; users see a partial product.
- Buy a component. If build-versus-buy shows a vendor module covers a six-week workstream, the date can move. Evaluate integration, licensing, and exit cost, not just the license fee.
- Add people only to parallelizable work, with a named integrator and a two-week ramp built into the plan. This supplements the plan; it does not replace it.
- Move the date. Quantify the regulatory penalty and compare it with the cost of overtime, rework, and escaped defects. Sometimes the penalty is cheaper than the crunch; that is a business decision the sponsor should make with numbers.
Comparison criteria: likelihood of hitting the regulatory date, total cost including rework and penalty, quality and audit risk, and reversibility. Recommendation: offer option 1 or 2 as primary with option 5 as fallback, and set a decision deadline at week 4, before hiring becomes irreversible.
3. How should the estimate be communicated and governed so that bad news arrives early rather than at week 15?
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Communicate a range and a pre-agreed trigger, not a commitment you cannot keep.
Practices:
- Report P50 and P80 with their assumptions and the top three uncertainty drivers: external dependency, contractor ramp, and regulator review. A single date implies precision that does not exist at this stage.
- Use a burn-up chart of accepted scope versus plan, updated weekly, rather than percent-complete derived from task counts.
- Define the re-plan trigger in advance: for example, if accepted scope at week 6 is below 80% of plan, or the external dependency slips, the plan is re-baselined and the sponsor is notified within 48 hours. A trigger agreed before bad news is a process; one invoked after is a negotiation.
- Separate estimating error from scope change; they have different remedies and different owners.
- Avoid anchoring on the sponsor's 16 weeks: present the estimate first, then the gap, then the options.
Why it matters: the failure mode is not the missed date; it is discovering it at week 15. Early quantified bad news preserves the options, namely scope cut, phased release, or date move, while late news leaves only crunch.
Governance artifact: a short weekly decision log recording forecast, assumptions changed, and the trigger status. It gives the sponsor a defensible basis for the regulatory conversation.